The heritage of the Civil War

THE HERITAGE
Of the
CIVIL WAR

by WILL HERBERG

Worker* Age Publishing Ass’n

228 Second Avenue,

New York City

The

HERITAGE of the CIVIL WAR

“The best representatives of the Amer¬
ican proletariat are those expressing the
revolutionary tradition in the life of the
American people. This tradition originated
in the war of liberation against the English
in the 18th century and in the Civil War
in the 19th century . . . Where can you
find an American so pedantic, so absolutely
idiotic as to deny the revolutionary and
progressive significance of the American
Civil War of 1860-65 Lenin.

THE ATTITUDE of the various classes
of a society to the critical periods of its his¬
tory is often a decisive index of the stage
these classes have reached in their social life-
cycle, of their relations among themselves and
to society as a whole. It is altogether symp¬
tomatic of the thoro inner decay of the bour¬
geoisie today that it openly rejects and belies
all that is great, vital and progressive in
American history or else distorts it beyond
recognition. It is fio less characteristic of the
historical immaturity of the American prole¬
tariat and of the lack of firm roots of its ad¬
vanced sections in the best traditions of our
people that this class, which should be the
“true guardian” of all that is revolutionary

in the past, is completely without any appre¬
ciation of its mission in this respect and has
never yet challenged the historical judgments
of the class enemy. But it is the radical in¬
tellectuals, by "nature,” so to speak, in living
contact with vital historical tradition, who
have failed most miserably and have thereby
exposed their own shallowness and lack of
penetrating social comprehension. For, with
a few notable exceptions, the radical intellec¬
tuals have no new word to say: they either
deny any significant bond with the past or
else echo helplessly and confusedly the reac¬
tionary falsifications of the bourgeoisie.

Take that heroic period of American his¬
tory usually recognized under the conven¬
tional rubrics of “The Abolition Movement,”
“The Civil War,” and "Reconstruction,” but
which really forms one organic epoch. The
great traditions of this period—and especially
of Reconstruction—are shamelessly repudiated
by the official heirs of Stevens and Sumner.
In the last quarter of a century hardly a sin¬
gle book has appeared consistently champion¬
ing or sympathetically interpreting the great
ideals of the crusade against slavery, whereas
scores and hundreds have dropped from the
presses in ignoble “extenuation” of the North,
in open apology of the Confederacy, in meas¬
ureless abuse of the Radical figures of Re¬
construction. The Reconstruction Period, as
the logical culmination of decades of previous

[ 2 ]

DJ

development, has borne the brunt of the re¬
action. The "classical” American historians
(typified by Rhodes) have pictured it as an
unpleasant episode intelligible only in terms
of “war-time passions” and "party politics."
The avowedly pro-Southern historians, begin¬
ning with Dunning, treat the period of Re¬
construction as the original sin, the source of
all evil in post-Civil War American life. The
“liberal” historians (Beard) exhibit an incred¬
ible shallowness and vulgarity of historical
judgment which are reflected in the works of
the so-called “Marxist” historians (Simons,
Oneal, Bimba).

How great the confusion is can be indicated
by an example. In an essay on Lowell in the
recent collection, American Writers on Amer¬
ican Literature, Robert Morss Lovett speaks
with disgust of the “envenomed fanaticism of
Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens” and
declares with conviction that "Johnson and
Seward were wisely carrying out Lincoln’s
policy of 1 Reconstruction.” Professor Lovett
is an extreme liberal, perhaps even a radical—
yet his historical judgments coincide perfectly
with those of the avowed apologists of the old
slaveocracy, of the pseudo-aristocracy built on
the toil and blood of millions of black slaves!

A revaluation of this, as of all other pe¬
riods of American history is a real intellectual
need of the day. And such a revaluation is
possible only from the vantage of the

14 )

revolutionary proletarian viewpoint, by means
of the historical dialectics of Marxism.

The American Civil War came as the cli¬
max of decades of profound economic conflicts
and social struggles. “The present struggle
between the South and the North,” wrote
Marx’ in 1861, “is . . . nothing but a strug¬
gle between two social systems, the system of
slavery and the system of free labor. Be¬
cause the two systems can no longer live peace¬
ably side by side on the North American con¬
tinent, the struggle has broken out.” This
"irrepressible conflict,” which manifested itself
in a clash ^between the agrarian slaveowners
and industrial bourgeoisie,|came to expression
in the battle over the limitation of slave ter-
ritory-^over the West, /n other words. “The
contest for the territories which opened the
dire epopee, was it not to decide whether the
virgin soil of immense tracts should be wedded
to the labor of the immigrant or prostituted
to the tramp of the slaveowners?” * But "the
continual expansion of territory and the con¬
tinual spread of slavery over and beyond its
old boundaries (were) the life principles of
the slave states of the Union” 1 and so the

1 Karl Marx, The Civil War in the United
States, in the Vienna Presse, November 7, 1861.

2 Address of the International Workingmen’s
Association to President Lincoln, published Decem¬
ber 23, 1864-, written by Marx.

3 Karl Marx, The Civil War in North America,
in the Vienna Presse, October 25, 1861.

struggle over the West was in the profound-
cst sense a struggle over the very existence
of the slave system as such.

The contest over slavery penetrated into
all spheres of national life. It was a strug¬
gle over labor and democracy as well. When
Marx* declared that, were it allowed to
maintain its existence, the “slave system would
infect the whole union ... In the Northern
states, where slavery is practically unfeasable,
the white working class would gradually be
pressed down to the level of helotism,” he
was merely drawing the obvious lesson from
the repeated declarations of the slaveowning
oligarchs vvho, thru Governor McDuffie of
South Carolina, pronounced the “laboring
population, bleached or unbleached, a dan¬
gerous clement in the body politic” • and, thru
Edward Everett, their Northern apologist,
announced that “the great relation of servi¬
tude in some form or other ... is inseparable
from our nature”. ♦ The thoroly anti-demo¬
cratic sentiments of the slaveowners were later
fully exposed in the Confederate constitution,
the work of their own hands. “A closer ex¬
amination of the history of the secession
movement,” wrote Marx, “shows that the

4 Karl Marx, The Civil War in the United
States, in the Vienna Presse, November 7, 1861.

5 The History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave
Power in America, by Henry Wilson, p. 325.

6 The History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave
Power in America, by Henry Wilson, p. 329.

secession constitution is all usurpation . ■ .
Nowhere did they allow the people to vote
en masse ... It was not only a question of
secession from the North but also of the con¬
solidation and sharpening of the power of the
oligarchy of the 300,000 slaveowners against
the five million whites of the South.” *

The great struggle went thru many stages
before it finally climaxed in war. Until its
very last phase, the objective significance of
the movement—the eradication of slavery—
remained quite outside the historical field
of vision of the Northern bourgeoisie as a
whole, altho it was far more obvious to the
Southern slaveowners. The class as a class
trod the path of revolution with the hesitating
steps of petty compromise and political bar¬
gaining. Even during the war Marx" branded
Lincoln’s actions as having “the appearance
of illiberal stipulated conditions which an at¬
torney presents to an opponent.” But, he
added, “this does not interfere with their
historic content."

The advance guard of the bourgeoisie, on
the other hand, developed far more rapidly
than the class as a whole. It reached a ma¬
ture stage of historical consciousness rela¬
tively early in the struggle. In the Aboli¬
tionists, almost exclusively! ideologists, this

7 Der Briefwechsel zwischtn Engels und Marx,
vol. 3, p. 26. Letter of Marx of July 1, 1861.

8 Briefwechsel, etc, vol. 3, p. 96. Letter of Marx
of October 29, 1862.

[61

[ 7 ]

intellectual vanguard found its concrete em¬
bodiment.

As a result of inevitable historical condi¬
tions, the Abolitionist vanguard arose and de¬
veloped apart from its class and, at times,
even in antagonism to it, the antagonism of
the narrow interests of the moment as coun-
terposed to the far-visioned interests of the
great historical objective.

The American Abolitionists were typical
bourgeois-democratic revolutionists under spe¬
cific American conditions. They felt their
movement linked up with the great humani¬
tarian causes of the day (the “labor question,”
the “peace question,” the emancipation of
women, temperance, philanthropy) and with
the bourgeois revoiuiionary movement in
Europe. “He hailed the revolution (of 1848)
in Fiance,” Moorficld Storey * tells of Sum¬
ner, "and similar outbreaks in other countries
as parts of the great movement for freedom,
of which the anti-slavery agitation in America
was another part.”

Their inevitable isolation from their class
and, above all, from the masses of the people,
their ideological introversion and self-suffi¬
ciency, gave the Abolitionists a distinctly mys¬
tical-utopian, anarchistic and pacifistic cast in

9 Charles Sumner, by Moorefield Storey, p. <1.
It is also interesting to note the later connections
between the Radicals and the Irish national revolu¬
tionaries, the Fenians.

18 ]

outlook. In a very real sense the Abolitionists
were the legitimate bearers of the “generous
purpose of transcendentalismthey were also
closely associated with the utopian socialist
movements of the 1840’s. Side by side with
the radical Utopians, there made themselves
felt in the ranks of the Abolitionists a terror¬
ist, insurrectionary wing (John Brown) as
well as a parliamentary political tendency
(Sumner). 11

It is now a century since the first heroic
cfioits were made to organize the Abolition
movement in this country in the face of a
hostile, or at best indifferent, public senti¬
ment. It was in the 1830’s that the various
local Anti-Slavery Societies, especially the
New York and New England organizations,
were formed and later united in the Amer¬
ican Anti-Slavery Society. A critical-histori¬
cal study of the whole movement American
Marxism certainly owes to the revolutionary
traditions of our people.

The inevitable march of events soon brought
on the Civil War. “From resistance to the
slave power," the North moved on to “death
to slavery.” 11 But the Civil War cannot be
studied in isolation. The Civil War and the

10 See my article, “Communists and Abolition¬
ists,” Workers Age, : April 9, 1932.

It Address of the International Workingmen’s
Association to President Lincoln, published Decem¬
ber 23, 18<4, written by Marx.

[91

Reconstruction Period form an organic unity;
they both constitute essentially a bourgeois
revolution in two stages: first, the defeat of
the armed counter-revolution of the slave¬
owners (the Civil War) and, secondly, the
attempt to draw all the historically necessary
consequences, economic, political, and social,
of this defeat of the counter-revolution (the
Reconstruction Period). In spite of the high¬
ly specific form which this bourgeois revolu¬
tion assumed in this country, “ its essential and
fundamental aims were still those of the clas¬
sical bourgeois-democratic revolution: the na¬
tional consolidation of the country (the de¬
feat of secession and of "States Rights”), the
thoro eradication of all pre-capitalist economic
forms (abolition of slavery), the destruction
of the political power of the aristocracy (dis¬
franchisement of the former slaveowners and
rebels), the advance of democracy (the en¬
franchisement of the Negroes and of the poor
whites in the South), the agrarian revolution
(the Radical plan of confiscating the lands of
the former slaveowners for distribution
among the emancipated slaves), etc. Nor can
the strict analogy be overlooked between the
military dictatorship established by the Jaco¬
bins in the reactionary rural departments of
France and the military rule of the South

12 A quite similar type of bourgeois revolution
took place in Switzerland in The War of Secession
of 1847 (Sonderbund War).

110 ]

during Reconstruction. The general histori¬
cal form is the same, however different may
be the external aspects of the specific episodes.

How profoundly similar in historical con¬
tent and even in significant phraseology was
the Civil War to the classical bourgeois-demo¬
cratic revolution can be seen from this thoroly
characteristic utterance of the great Radical
leader, Thad Stevens: “

“It is intended to revolutionize their (the
South’s) principles and feelings ... to
work a radical reorganization in Southern
institutions, habits, and manners . . . The
whole fabric of Southern society must be
changed, and it never can be done if this op¬
portunity is lost ... How can republican
institutions, free schools, free churches, free
social intercourse, exist in a mingled com¬
munity of nabobs and serfs; of the owners
of twenty thousand acre manors with lord¬
ly palaces and the occupants of narrow huts
inhabited by ‘low white trash’? If the
South is ever to be made a safe republic
let her lands be cultivated by the toil of
the owners or the free labor of intelligent
citizens. This must be done even tho it
drives her nobility into exile! If they go,
all the better. It will be hard to persuade
the owner of ten thousand acres of land,
who drives a coach and four, that he is not
degraded by sitting at the same table or in
the same pew, with the embrowned and
hard-handed farmer who has himself cul¬
tivated his own thriving homestead of 150
acres. The country would be well rid of

13 Speech at Lancaster, P»., September 7, 1S65.

mi

the proud, bloated and defiant rebels . . .
The foundations of their institutions . . .
must be broken up and relaid, or all our
blood and treasure have been spent in
vain.”

Our “liberal” historians, whose vulgar
philistinism is equalled only by the narrow¬
mindedness of those “Marxian” historians who
echo them, stand puzzled, even aghast, before
the great events of this heroic period and
are able only to mumble some platitudinous
phrases about "corruption” and “greed”! Of
course, there was corruption and greed—and
on an almost incredible scale tool But after
all it was a bourgeois revolution operating on
the sacrosanct level of private property and
private appropriation. Whatever the fatal
finger of private property touches, it cor¬
rupts! Nevertheless, mankind is profoundly
interested that, in the struggle between the
lower and higher forms of private property
(forms of exploitation), the latter should
emerge victorious, for their victory signifies
the final relegation to the scrap-heap of his¬
tory of much that is outlived and reactionary
in the institutions of society and a great step
forward along the road towards the eventual
emancipation of the human race from every
form of exploitation and oppression. “I na¬
turally see what is repulsive in the form of
the Yankee movement,” wrote Marx, ** “but

14 Briefwechsel, etc., vol. 3, p. 96. Letter of
October 29, 1862. It should be recalled also that

[12J

I find the reason for it in the nature of a
bourgeois democracy . . . where swindle has
been on the sovereign throne for so long.
Nevertheless the events are world-upheav¬
ing .. . ”

"Two paths and two outcomes are possible
in every bourgeois revolution”: *< the radical
(Jacobin) and the conservative (Girondin)
roads. The struggle between these two courses
forms the essential content of the whole Re¬
construction Period. At first the Radical
course had the upper hand and it looked as if
the bourgeois-democratic revolution would be
carried thru to its ultimate conclusion. Then
came a period of vacillation. Finally the Con¬
servative course (outlined by Lincoln and
championed by Johnson) emerged triumphant.
The Negro slave was indeed legally eman¬
cipated but he was not transformed into a
free (in the bourgeois sense) proletarian or
independent peasant-proprietor. No; the slave
status gave way Jbefore a new semi-servile
status, a caste status in which the American
Negro has labored ever since.

To what must the triumph of the Conser-

the great orgy of corruption in the post-Civil War
days came with the triumph of the Conservatives
and as a preparatory phase of it. Engels (Anti-
Duhring) speaks of the "swindle and speculation
flourishing in the decline of the revolution.”

IS Two Tactics of the Social-democracy in the
Democratic Revolution, by V. I. Lenin

113]

vatives and the frustration and distortion of
the democratic revolution be attributed? Not
merely to the resistance of the still powerful
ruling class of the South but also to the inner
weakness of the Northern capitalist class itself,
within which there emerged powerful reaction¬
ary elements. Several factors, closely intertwin¬
ed, played a decisive part in bringing about this
turn of events: the role of the West, the ef¬
fect of the tremendous expansion of Northern
capitalism and the retreat of the more con¬
servative sections of the bourgeoisie before
the ultimate implications of the democratic
revolution carried thru to completion.

The unhampered and unrestrained exploi¬
tation of the West became the absorbing ob¬
ject of the decisive sections of the Northern
bourgeoisie, especially the financiers and mer¬
chants—had not the struggle over the West
played the leading role in precipitating the
war? On the basis of the decisive victory of
the industrial bourgeoisie thru the Civil War,
an unprecedented expansion of industry, com¬
merce and finance along strictly capitalist lines
began, in the course of which the Federal
government was converted into a most ener¬
getic and avowed champion of the economic
interests of the industrial bourgeoisie (tariff,
resumption of specie payment, grants to rail¬
roads and other corporations, etc.). The
tremendous upsurge of capitalism did not pro¬
ceed along the lines of the industrialization

( "bourgeoisification”) of the South (indus¬
trialization here had to wait until the 1890’s
for a real start); it was almost entirely ab¬
sorbed in the economic expansion of the North
and in the West. And for the free exploita¬
tion of the West, for unhampered expansion
in the North, "peace” in the rear was neces¬
sary. The “disturbed condition” of the South,
the natural consequence of any serious attempt
at a revolutionary transformation of the
Southern order, must be ended, of course thru
a compromise with the ex-slaveowners at the
expense of the Negro freedmen, the masses
of the poor white Southern population and
the interests of the country as a whole.

Furthermore the radicalism of the Radicals
was beginning to go much too far to suit the
money lords and merchant princes. Just as
the conservative sections of the French bour¬
geoisie recoiled at the "excesses” of the Jaco¬
bin radicals, so did these gentlemen draw back
in consternation at the agrarianism, equalita-
rianism and "violence” of the Radicals.
Marx '• has called attention to the fact that
“Mr. Wade (a leading Radical, president
of the Senate.—W.H.) declared in public
meetings that after the abolition of slavery,
a radical change in the relations of capital
and of property in land is next upon the
order of the day.”

16 Capital, by Karl Man. Preface to the first
edition.

II5J

[14]

Henry Cooke of the notorious banking firm
of Jay Cooke, wrote:’ 1

“You know how I have felt for a long
time, in regard to the course of the ultra-
infidelic radicals like Wade, Sumner, Ste¬
vens et id onine genus. They were drag¬
ging the Republican party into all sorts of
isms and extremes. Their policy was one
of bitterness, hate and wild agrarianism.
These reckless demagogues have had their
day and the time has come for wiser coun¬
sel. With Wade uttering agrarian doc¬
trines in Kansas and fanning the flames of
vulgar prejudices, trying to array labor
against capital and pandering to the basest
passions; with Butler urging wholesale
conscription thruout the South and whole¬
sale repudiation thruout the North . . . ;
with Stevens . . . advocating the idea of a
flood of irredeemable paper money . . . ;
with Pomeroy and Wade and Sprague and
a host of others clamoring for the unsexing
of woman and putting a ballot in her hand
. . . what wonder is it that the accumulated
load was too heavy for any party to car¬
ry .. . ?”

Thus came Thermidor in the second Am¬
erican revolution!

Two historical motives are indissolubly
fused in every bourgeois revolution: on the
one hand, the bourgeoisie ruthlessly clears the
way of all pre-capitalist forms, of all “rem¬
nants of feudalism”; on the other, with the
newly won state power as a lever, it stimulates

powerfully the accumulation of capital (which
takes on the aspect of a primitive accumula¬
tion) as well as the expansion of the capitalist
mode of production as a whole. The con¬
tradictory’ character of capitalism is reflected
in the deeply contradictory mode of develop¬
ment of these two motives which are never¬
theless inseparable. The former involves the
progressive movement of the bourgeoisie, sup¬
ported by the petty bourgeois strata and the
proletariat, against the feudal elements (land¬
owning aristocrats, slaveowners, etc.); the
latter, the reactionary movement of the bour¬
geoisie, now frequently supported by the pil¬
lars of the old regime, against the petty bour¬
geoisie and the proletariat. In the American
Civil War, because of the specific form and
circumstance under which the bourgeois revo¬
lution took place (its relative “lateness” his¬
torically), the second motive was dominant
almost from the very beginning. For the
Northern bourgeoisie Reconstruction became
more and moTe a question of maintaing its
hold (thru the Republican party) over the
government, especially the Federal govern¬
ment, and less and less a question of trans¬
forming the South economically and socially.
Since the genuine Radical course greatly em¬
phasized the latter, indeed made it the very
center of its program, the Northern bour¬
geoisie quickly liquidated Radicalism as such,
altho retaining the old name and many of
[17]

17 E. P. Oberboltzer, Life of Jay Cooke, II, 23.

(161

the phrases for campaign use. That is the
reason why so many of the old Abolitionists
and Radicals, typified by Sumner, ultimately
broke with the Republican party altogether.
Under Grant it was already no longer the
party of Stevens and Wade and Sumner. It
is well known how sharply Sumner criticized
Grant and his administration for their indif¬
ferent attitude towards the fundamental prob¬
lems in the real emancipation of the black
man.

In a very real sense, the Radical course was
defeated when the Northern bourgeoisie final¬
ly rejected the plan of confiscating the large
estates of the ex-slaveowners for distribution
among the freedmen and the poor Unionist
whites of the South, for without land eman¬
cipation was robbed of its economic founda¬
tion. » “We do not confiscate loyal men, nor

18 It is interesting to see how clearly the then
radical Georges Clemenceau, in America as corre¬
spondent of the Paris Temps, understood this. On
September 26, 1865, he wrote (American Recon¬
struction, 1865-1870): “The real misfortune of the
Negro race is in owning no land of its own. There
cannot be real (read: bourgeois.—W.H.) emancipa¬
tion for men who do not possess at least a small
portion of the soil ... In spite of the war, and the
confiscatior. bills, which remain dead letters, every
inch of the land in the Southern states belongs to
the former rebels ... It would be too much to
expect those masters of their own accord to con¬
ciliate the Negroes by conceding them a little
land ...”

rebels unless they ate rich,” Stevens wrote to
a Southerner" and previously he had declared:
“Forty acres of land and a hut would be more
valuable to the freedman than the immediate
right to vote.” " Sumner too appreciated the
supreme significance of land for the freedman.
“Sumner felt that without education or land
the freedmen would be at the mercy of their
former masters,” his biographer tells us. ”■
But the Northern bourgeoisie as a class never
seriously intended to carry thru such a revolu¬
tionary course as the confiscation of the land;
it was already far too conservative for such
heroic measures, the threat of agrarianism in
the West and of the rising labor movement in
the North was already too great. The bour¬
geoisie turned sharply to the right and Radi¬
cal Reconstruction was lost l

Very few at the time really appreciated how
lost the Radical cause was, for the old phrases
were still current. But Thad Stevens was
among the few. Already in 1866 Stevens saw
what was ahead. In the House he made one
of the most powerful and most pathetic
speeches of his career:

“In my youth,” so runs the report of
his speech in the Congressional Globe of
June 4, 1866, "in manhood, and in old
age, I had fondly dreamed that when any

19 New York World, June 10, 1867.

20 Speech in House of Representatives, May 1866.

21 Lift of Charles Sumner, by Moorefield Storey,
p. 132.

IIS]

[19]

fortunate chance broke up for a while the
foundations of our institutions,” they would
be remodeled “as to have freed them of
every vestige of human oppression, of ine¬
quality of rights, of recognized degradation
of the poor and the superior caste of the
rich . . . This bright dream has vanished
like the baseless fabric of a vision. 1 find
that we shall be obliged to be content with
patching up the worst portions of the an¬
cient edifice and leaving it in many of its
parts to be swept thru by the tempests, the
frosts, and the storms of despotism.”

But content he was not . . .

Far away in London, Karl Marx saw and
fully understood the signs of the times. On
June 24, 1865, only a few months after the
new President has assumed office, Marx
wrote” to Engels:

“Johnson’s policy disturbs me. Ridicu¬
lous affectation of severity against indivi¬
dual persons; up to now highly vacillating
and weak in the thing itself. The reaction
has already begun in America and will soon
be strengthened if this spinelessness is not
put an end to."

And thirteen years later, on July 25, 1877 ”
he signalized the consummation of the histori¬
cal betrayal of the Northern bourgeoisie and
the Republican party in these words:

"The policy of the new president
(Hayes) will make the Negroes, and the

22 Br'njwtchstl, etc., vol. 3.

23 Rrieiu’echtel, etc., vol. 4.

[ 20 ]

i great expropriations of land in favor of the
railways, mining companies, etc . . . will
make the already dissatisfied farmers into
allies of the working class.”

For the last fifty years it has been the fash¬
ion among historians to represent the Recon¬
struction governments of the Southern states
in the grossest caricature, as grotesque mon¬
strosities, as veritable nightmares of corrup¬
tion, oppression and intrigue. Such shame¬
ful falsification must be destroyed. These
governments, based upon the upsurging poli¬
tical activity of the newly emancipated slaves
led by Northern men (“carpetbaggers”) and
some Southern white Radicals (“scalawags”),
certainly did not compare in courtly grace
and aristocratic pretension with the pre-war
governments of the slaveowners. A people
suddenly awakened to freedom is likely to be
somewhat careless of political conventions,
somewhat irregular in political behavior, some¬
what impetuous in political life. Gross “ex¬
cesses” are natural and inevitable and only
narrow-minded philistines will whiningly
echo the enraged howls of the dispossessed
oppressors. Yet, when we come to examine
them, the charges made by such men as
Rhodes, Oberholtzer, Dunning, Bowers, etc.,
even if taken at their face value, which they
assuredly should not be, are charges that might
with equal force be leveled against every gov¬
ernment, Federal, state and municipal, North
and South, Republican and Democratic, of
[ 21 ]

the time—and against the “lily-white” Resto¬
ration governments that followed in the South
with the reaction. Only compare the public
moneys stolen by officers of the Reconstruction
governments with the vast sums that found
their way into the pockets of the Tweed Ring
in the perfectly Conservative, Democratic,
Copperhead City of New York!

The great significance of the Reconstruc¬
tion governments lies in their positive revo¬
lutionary work. It was these governments
that smashed, temporarily at least, the in¬
credibly vicious “Black Codes.” DuBois very
correctly emphasizes 14 that

“in legislating concerning property, the
wider functions of the state, the punish¬
ment of crime, and the like, it is sufficient
to say that the laws on these points estab¬
lished by the Reconstruction legislatures
were not only very different from but even
revolutionary to the laws in the older
South.”

It must not be forgotten that it was the
Reconstruction governments—the despised Ne¬
gro-carpetbagger-scalawag regime—that estab¬
lished democratic government in South, that
enfranchised the poor whites, who had been
deprived of their right to vote and of many
civil liberties in the old South because of their
poverty, that set up a free public school sys¬
tem where public education had been largely
unknown, that “abolished the whipping-post,

T4 W. E. B. DuBois, The Negro, p. 220.

the branding-iron, the stocks, and other bar¬
baric modes of punishment” (Tourgee), that
“reduced capital felonies from about twenty
to three,” that broke the ground in the way
of social legislation. Speaking of the Recon¬
struction conventions, Oberholtzer is forced
to admit:“

“The various assemblies had much in
common. It was said of them truly by a
conservative in Louisiana that they were
agrarian and revolutionary. Our own and
the French Revolutions had not yielded
more prolific discussion of the subject of
freedom and equality, the ‘inherent right
of suffrage' under a republican form ol
government, the ‘Crod-given and sacred
right’ to vote, the ‘halo of liberty’, which,
henceforward, would surround every hu¬
man head, especially if it belonged to a
poor and ignorant man.”

There were giants in those days because it
was an age demanding and creating giants.
The great figures that led the Abolition and
Radical hosts in desperate battle deserve the
profoundest respect of the revolutionist of to¬
day, of every man who prizes liberty and hu¬
man progress. Thad Stevens, the indomitable
warrior, the Great Commoner, whose badge
of honor is the frantic hate that the slave¬
owners and their spiritual descendants have
heaped upon his memory for generations;
Charles Sumner, the incorruptible, the incar¬
nate heart and conscience of the nation, hold¬
ing ideals and principles far above party and

[23]

[221

place; Wendell Phillips, the fiery-tongued
Abolitionist, the invincible tribune of the
friendless and the oppressed, the living bond
between yesterday and today, between the war
against chattel-slavery and the struggle against
capitalist wage-slavery. To the revolution¬
ists of today belongs their tradition and not
to the lily-white party of Hoover the slave-
trader !

We are the truer guardians—let us claim
our heritage!

25 E. P. Oberholtzer, History of the United States
since the Civil JVar. Vol. 22. p. 37.

(Reprinted from the Modern Quarterly,
Summer number, 1932 in whiah it appeared
under the title of "The Civil War In New
Perspective ").